One of three lectures with Nottingham Irish Studies Group this season

‘But what really happened?’: Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Anne Enright is one of the most innovative and exciting writers in Ireland today. Her work, with its dark humour and wryness, is able to be hilariously funny while dealing with serious subjects. Her career to date bookends the Celtic Tiger Ireland of the 1990s and early 2000s, and her work comments directly on the cultural climate of these years, considering the relationship between past and present, between how we remember and what we forget, both individually and at the level of the nation.

Enright’s interest in giving a voice to what has been silenced and repressed by history is matched by playful experiments with form and unreliable narrative, and an unnerving honesty.  Her novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker prize in 2007, begins with Veronica Hegarty, a Dublin housewife and very unreliable narrator, breaking the news of her brother Liam’s suicide to their mother. We follow her on her attempts to make sense of Liam’s life and death, and to try to uncover a hidden trauma –  which may or may not have happened, or which may have happened to her, rather than her brother – at the heart of the rackety Hegarty family’s life.

Sinead joined De Montfort University in 2014 as a Research Fellow and in 2016 was appointed a Senior Lecturer in English. Her research interests include Irish literature, modernism, the work of Samuel Beckett, and women’s writing, particularly Irish women’s writing of the late 19th and early 20th century, and contemporary writing. She has taught and published widely in these areas.

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This event is a book group discussion – Kamila Shamsie will not be present! Five Leaves Book Group is open, you can attend one meeting or all, there is no commitment other than to have read the book in advance and be ready to discuss it.

We don’t mind where you obtain the book, but we do offer a 15% discount in the lead up to the event.

Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. He inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

A contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire compelling story of loyalties torn apart when love and politics collide. This book won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Join us to celebrate international poetry in a reading featuring translated work from Farsi, Greek, Russian, Irish and other languages. Members of Nottingham Poetry Society and Beeston Poets will share their favourite poetic voices from around the world.

Special guest Maura Dooley will talk about her experience of translating the work of Iranian refugee Azita Ghahreman collected in her new book of Ghahreman’s poetry Negatives of a Group Photograph.

Bar available. Under 18s to be accompanied by an adult.

This event forms part of the Inpire Poetry Festival taking place across Beeston, Mansfield, Southwell, West Bridford and Worksop Libraries.

In association with Nottingham Poetry Society

Tickets £5 (£1 from every ticket will be donated to a local refugee charity).

Note: tickets are only available from Beeston Library or inspireculture.org.uk/poetry-festival, and not from Five Leaves

Professor Wendy Miriam Kural Shaw (Freie Univiversität, Berlin, Germany)

Chair and Event Organiser: Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar (NTU)

This talk comprises part of the House of Wisdom exhibition at the Bonington Gallery running from 28 September to 28 October 

Jonathan will be reading from his latest collection, Cassandra Complex, a collection of poems, found poems, found translations, mis-translations, prophecies, pseudo-prophecies, apocalyptic visions and moments of retroactive clairvoyance.

His previous books include the novel Melissa (Salt), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta), and an earlier poetry collection, Musicolepsy (Shoestring Press). He has been a popular reader at the bookshop, States of Independence and, this summer, at Lowdham Book Festival.

What They Left Behind is Sue Dymoke’s third Shoestring Press collection after Moon at the Park and Ride and The New Girls – new and selected poems. She is a Reader in Education at the University of Leicester where she researches and teaches aspects of poetry pedagogy. She has given writing workshops and keynote lectures at universities in Japan, New Zealand and Europe as well as in primary schools, secondary schools and writers’ groups. She is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. Other honours include the Terry Furlong Research Award from the National Association for the Teaching of English and a National Teaching Fellowship. She is the author of Drafting and Assessing Poetry (Paul Chapman); two  volumes from Bloomsbury, Making Poetry Matter: international research on poetry pedagogy and Making Poetry Happen: transforming the poetry classroom, and, with Andy Croft, edited the anthology Not Just a Game: Sporting Poetry (Five Leaves).

Tonight she will be reading from her latest Shoestring collection – being launched this evening.

Becky Cullen will be reading from Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings, which is a pamphlet of contrary people waiting to whisper in your ear – mothers, children, those who want to tell a secret or explain something before it’s too late, those who don’t quite fit and those who don’t want to. Characters such as Majid, a young boy who loves his mother, encourage us to see the same things repeatedly and to see them differently each time.

This is a pamphlet of poems which shine and crackle with their own dark electricity. Finely wrought, precise and wide ranging in their themes, they carry a pleasing shiver of wildness in their hearts. – Liz Berry

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming, on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

OK, Five Leaves is not an all-night bookstore (but a shop can dream, can’t it?) but we do have lots of events going on in the evenings! Tonight we start a bit later than normal to be something more of an all-night bookstore for this Candlestick Press event with David Belbin reading his short story, The All-Night Bookshop together with some related material.

The bookshop in question is a mysterious independent bookshop, with an even more mysterious owner.

Today is Bookshop Day, an annual celebration run by the Booksellers Association/Books Are My Bag, with hundreds of events in bookshops across the country.

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

At this event Kathy will be in conversation about her career and reading from her new novel from And Other Stories, Dear Evelyn. The story starts between the wars in a working-class South London street where the sensitive Miles seeks out literature in Battersea Library. There he meets Evelyn and there follows an unconventional seventy year love story which moves from the terraced streets of South London to war service in Africa and the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs.

Kathy Page’s work has been praised by Sarah Waters and Margaret Atwood and we are pleased to welcome her over from Canada.

Kathy Page is a British writer, now living in Canada. One of her earlier books, The Story of My Face,  grew out of a writer’s residency at Nottingham Prison. That book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for women’s fiction.

Review comments about Dear Evelyn

“captivating” Toronto Star

“With tender, ruthless insight, Kathy Page exposes the secret machinations of a longstanding marriage in her brilliant new novel, Dear Evelyn. Caught in our own brief liaisons, we watch with longing (and horror) as Harry and Evelyn move from breathless first love to the divorce that death inevitably exacts. However you are coupled, you will never look at your partner the same way again.”  Merilyn Simonds, author of  The Convict Lover

“The seven ages of man, and woman, are traced against the tremendous historical and social shifts of a switchback century…quietly hums with emotional charge. The war years, with Harry fighting in North Africa and Evelyn struggling with a young child at home, are especially vivid, but this watchful, empathetic chronicle retains sensitivity through the less obviously eventful decades of home-building and child-rearing….Page’s watchful and very British tale remains devoted to both and forgiving to the end. A searching, and touching, depiction of the places where married lives merge and the places where they never do.” Kirkus (starred review)

Admission: £5 including tea and scones. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Emily Brontë’s incomparable Wuthering Heights is, for many of us, one of our most cherished novels, with the character of Heathcliff being the ultimate romantic hero. It is a work that has bewitched us for almost 200 years. But Emily herself remains an enigmatic, even mysterious figure, often painted unfairly in a negative light. In this talk Claire O’Callaghan conjures a new image of the great writer by looking at her afresh from the vantage point of the new millennium. It’s a biography with a twist, taking in the themes of her life and work – her feminism, her passion for the natural world – as well as the art she has inspired, and even the “fake news” stories about her. What we discover is that she was, a thoroughly modern woman. And now, in the 21st century, it’s time for the real Emily Brontë to please stand up.

Claire O’Callaghan lectures in English at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and queerness.  She is a specialist on the works of the novelist Sarah Waters but her present research is on the lives and works of the Brontës, especially Emily Brontë.

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Leafe Press was launched at a reading in Nottingham in April 2000, and has published a wide range of poetry, though our main interest at present is in innovative or experimental poetry.

Tonight’s reading comprises new and old work from Frances Presley, Martin Stannard and Andrew Taylor.

As well as pamphlets and books, Leafe publishes the online magazine Litter  (http://www.leafepress.com/litter/index.html).

£3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming by emailing us at  events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for first full collection.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s oldest independent Caribbean speciality bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, is published by Peepal Tree Press. Shivanee also blogs about LGBT+ issues in the Caribbean.

Admission: £5 (£4 concessions) including refreshments. Booking essential via events@fiveleaves.co.uk

In association with Renaissance One and Nottingham City of Literature

Your collection reveals a plethora of women, either as witness (i. e. the virgin in the woods), or women who have been vilified (the abortionist’s daughter) or who have been cast out and banished/excluded (Lilith). Many of your poems subvert the demonic and offer a counterpointal view; they give us kind parents for ‘the wicked’, for example. Can some of this be ‘writing back’ or even rewriting the tainted women of the old books? Recasting lore and folklore? I’m thinking of this as a tradition in female Caribbean writing, Rhys, Melville etc.

I’ve been in love with nasty women long before that term acquired currency as a trending battle cry. This is the reason Kali is the god of my household of one – no sanitised version, but Kali in her black-skinned, murderous, protectorate ire and grace. It’s my honour to write about women who bleed, fuck, dance, cuss, transact and thief without apology, be they gentle or garrotte-hearted.

No need to book, just turn up and do it! Last year everyone wanted to know what everyone else is reading.

Our main display table will be entirely devoted to Black writers in support of the day.

This event was started by the Nottingham Black Archive.

In association with Nottingham Poetry Exchange, we are pleased to welcome the experimental poet Hazel Smith, from Australia. Hazel will be joined by acclaimed poet,  Matthew Welton, who also lectures in creative writing at The University of Nottingham.

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published four volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works.  Her volume, Word Migrants, was published by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney. The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, with accompanying CD Rom, was published by Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii. In 2016 her multimedia collaboration ‘motions’ with Will Luers and Roger Dean was included in the Electronic Literature Collection 3: the premier international anthology of electronic writing.  Her collaboration with Will Luers and Roger Dean ‘novelling’ was shortlisted for the ‘Turn on Literature Prize’, an initiative of the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in the US, Europe, UK and Australasia. Her website is at www.australysis.com

You can hear Hazel read at  http://www.australysis.com/hear-see-read/aLYS-works/worksHText.html

Hazel Smith was a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the Western Sydney University from 2007-2017 and is now an adjunct professor. She is author of The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press. She is co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia and The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press.

Admission £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Rod Madocks specialises in writing on the difficult world of mental health and social work, having great sympathy for life’s casualties. Tonight he will be reading from Our Tan: memoir of a destroyed life, a lament for the loss of a young woman and a savage critique of the institutions that failed her.

Tania Blair was a young mother of two boys leading an unremarkable life in County Durham until social services took a hand. Once a front-line social worker himself, Rod Madocks uses his own experience to explore the faulty rationale and inept practices of child protection teams. This memoir casts an unforgiving eye on health and social care agencies in general and on the fate of the English working class as they are tipped down the maw of a globalised future. Our Tan is a book that had to be written because no other avenues of help were left.

A transgressive writer, Rod Madocks is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories exploring themes of crime, guilt and loss. He has also published a memoir on the WW2 poet Sidney Keyes. His work has been shortlisted for a Crime Writing Association Dagger Award. He had a twenty year career working in maximum security psychiatric units and mental health teams before becoming a full time writer.

John Lucas, Rod Madocks’ editor at Shoestring Press has had a long career as a poet and critic and a late-flowering career as a writer of fiction. His books also include a short history of whistling, published by Five Leaves.  John follows his four novels with a collection of short fiction, launched tonight,  The Hotel of Dreams and other stories.

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This talk reconstructs the first two decades of the twentieth century feminist magazine Time and Tide and explores the periodical’s significance for an interwar generation of British women writers and readers. Unique in establishing itself as the only female-run ‘journal of opinion’ in what press historians describe as the golden age of the weekly review, Time and Tide both challenged persistent prejudices against women’s participation in public life, and played an instrumental role in redefining women’s gender roles and identities. Drawing on extensive new archival research Catherine offers insights into the history and workings of this periodical that no one has dealt with to date, and makes a major contribution to the history of women’s writing and feminism in Britain between the wars.

Contributors to Time and Tide included  D. H. Lawrence, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf, Crystal Eastman, Charlotte Haldane, Storm Jameson, Nancy Astor , Eleanor Rathbone, Margaret Wintringham, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Robins, Rose Macaulay, Mary  Agnes Hamilton, Naomi Mitchison, Helena Swanwick, Ellen Wilkinson, Ethel Smyth, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Ernst Toller, Robert Graves and George Orwell.

Dr Clay is Course Leader for the MRes in English Literary Research postgraduate degree programme at Nottingham Trent Univerity. She also teaches across the undergraduate curriculum, including on Gender and Sexuality.

Admission: £3, including refreshments, redeemable against any purchase

This event is a book group discussion – Chris Packham will not be present! Five Leaves Book Group is open, you can attend one meeting or all, there is no commitment other than to have read the book in advance and be ready to discuss it.

We don’t mind where you obtain the book, but we do offer a 15% discount in the lead up to the event.

Every minute was magical, every single thing it did was fascinating and everything it didn’t do was equally wondrous, and to be sat there, with a Kestrel, a real live Kestrel, my own real live Kestrel on my wrist! I felt like I’d climbed through a hole in heaven’s fence.

An introverted, unusual young boy, isolated by his obsessions and a loner at school, Chris Packham only felt at ease in the fields and woods around his suburban home.

But when he stole a young Kestrel from its nest, he was about to embark on a friendship that would teach him what it meant to love, and that would change him forever.

In his emotionally exposing memoir, Chris brings to life his childhood in the 70s, from his bedroom bursting with fox skulls, birds’ eggs and sweaty jam jars, to his feral adventures. But pervading his story is the search for freedom, meaning and acceptance in a world that didn’t understand him.

Recent television programmes and a World Service radio programme included Chris Packham talking about his autism, a subject we return to at Five Leaves steadily in various formats.

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Following on from our packed house with Grace Petrie last Christmas, we welcome singer songwriter Rhiannon Scutt for an acoustic session at Five Leaves. ‘One of the most compelling UK artists right now, Rhiannon Scutt brings a whole new meaning to the word watchable. Armed only with an acoustic guitar, she is capable of silencing an audience the moment she utters the first line.’ Inspired by Ani DiFranco, Joan Armatrading & Big Thief.   You can see her here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEz0fTQmYkE

Entry £10 in advance.  To book a place, simply email us at  fiveleaves.bookshopevents@gmail.com  and we will contact you for payment.

Unthank Books published Tania’s third short story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others in May.  You can hear her read some of her stories on soundcloud.com/taniahershman.

Tania is the founder of ShortStops, a website designed to whip up excitement about short fiction and was founder of The Short Review. She is a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow and co-author of Writing Short Stories: a Writers & Artists Companion. Before writing fiction (and poetry) full time she was a science journalist and a number of her short stories and residencies draw on her scientific background.

As well as reading some of her short fiction, Tania will lead a discussion about writing short fiction.

She will be joined by three Nottingham writers reading their own short fiction, including Susan Barsby whose work has appeared in various magazines and zines and, recently, in 24 Stories of Hope (for survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire).

Su

Tickets: £4 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk.

Michael Rosen is best-known for his children’s books, but came here a year or two back to talk about Emile Zola.

Tonight he will be talking about his own early years – growing up in a Jewish Communist family in London. He’ll be reading from his memoir So They Call You Pisher!

Michael recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. Born in the North London suburbs, his parents, Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage Communists in the 1930s Jewish East End. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe. Unlike the children around them, Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution. Party meetings were held in the front room, summers were for communist camping holidays, till it all changed after a trip to East Germany, when in 1957 his parents decided to leave “the Party.” Michael followed his own journey of radical self-discovery: running away to march against the bomb at Aldermaston, writing and performing in experimental political theatre and getting arrested during the 1968 movement.

He will also be discussing his Workers’ Tales - his research into published socialist fairytales of the 19th and 20th century in Britain Reading and Rebellion, radical writing for children in the first half of the twentieth century. Productive, that Michael Rosen!

This event is for adults really.

Tickets: £5 (£4 concessions) from Five Leaves Bookshop – please buy in advance

Now You See Me is a collection of powerful personal accounts which bring to light previously undocumented lesbian lives. Jane Traies has been recording the life histories of older women who identify as lesbian for nearly a decade and the narratives in Now You See Me are drawn from this archive of ‘hidden histories’. The stories are told in the women’s own words and vividly recreate a time when being lesbian meant either hiding your true identity or paying the price for breaking society’s rules. The personal is still political in this moving and inspiring book.

‘A pure delight from beginning to end, it tells the stories that we always knew were there but have seldom seen in print. And we have never seen them told quite so beautifully or so honestly. The care and respect that Jane Traies has for her contributors shines through in her insightful editing and the poignant commentary she offers between the stories. This book is an absolute gem.’ – Clare Summerskill

Jane Traies is the author of The Lives of Older Lesbians (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and a number of other publications in the field of ageing and sexuality. As Jay Taverner, she was also joint author of the lesbian historical novels Rebellion, Hearts and Minds and Something Wicked.

Venue: Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham

Damien Le Bas is a rarity – though this is changing – a Romany Traveller who rode and drove ponies, tractors and trucks, who could rocker Romanes (speak Romany) yet went on to study at Christ’s Hospital and Oxford University. From 2011 to 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times,  Britain’s only national magazine for all the Traveller communities.

In The Stopping Places (recently heard on BBC Radio 4) he travels the all over Britain visiting the atchin tans, places were Travelling people used to and sometimes still stop or congregate, from well-known Festivals to Gypsy churches, to semi-secret lanes and commons.

Picture from Appleby Horse Fair

The Traveller worlds are little known and seldom understood by outsiders, yet their numbers include the singer David Essex, the footballer Wayne Rooney, the showjumper Phoebe Buckley, the actor Bob Hoskins… This talk, however, is not about Romany celebs, but about the Traveller world of the past and present.

Venue: in the Bookshop